


The Chairman

by Valas



Category: Le Petit Prince | The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:19:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24878332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valas/pseuds/Valas
Summary: Before he found the Pilot, the little prince met in de Saint-Exupéry's tale a lot of adults of varying quality and oddity. But it seems the writer left, for unclear reasons, this particular meeting out: a Chairman who is also in the possession of an abundance of roses.The little prince's curiosity, ever ready, is piqued.Basically a meeting of two fairy tales, each a rather different sort.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	The Chairman

_The Chairman_

CHAPTER XIII – B

Hearing the little prince talk about his rose that was far away, I said: ‘She sounds like a difficult flower.’  
‘She is,’ nodded the little prince.  
‘Why then did you keep tending her? For all the trouble she was worth?’  
The little prince frowned.  
‘You don’t understand flowers very much!’ he said.  
‘Well, I am a pilot, not a gardener.’  
He sighed, and then he turned his head away to the horizon, as if he expected to see the midday sun already underway to a sunset as on his own small planet.  
‘I didn’t understand her either,’ he said. ‘I was too young to not confuse her words with her deeds. But I did dust off her glass globe. I made a screen for her at night against tigers and I did water her every dawn.’  
There came silent tears in his eyes.  
‘And now I have left her with her four little thorns in all the world!’  
He kept silent for a time. I resumed my attempts to repair the plane and was busy trying to pull the engine back to life when the little prince began to speak again.  
‘I once met a man who had a lot of roses.’

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
  
When the little prince left the fourth planet he found in its shadow an asteroid. It was a dry and empty place save for a great tower that stood tall and proud. It looked like a great white sword half-buried in the surface.  
This made the little prince curious, and he flew over the cratered landscape and landed on the balcony. Then he went inside the tower and met there the chairman.  
The chairman was clothed in a regal uniform equipped with unusual ornaments such as a red aiguillette connecting his jacket with the shoulder.  
He smiled at the little prince: “Be welcome. Are you a fine flower come alive?”  
The little prince frowned. “I am no flower.”  
The chairman smiled again. “Pardon the metaphor. Your green clothes and fair hair made you seem very much as a flower.”  
“Well, you don’t know much about flowers!” the little prince said.  
The chairman laughed. “I would suppose having a rose garden disproves that. Wouldn’t you agree?”  
“Oh, rose garden! There is more than a rose?” And then the little prince added: “But I have seen no roses here.”  
“You saw wrong. Look again,” the chairman gestured the little prince to the balcony.

The little prince looked over the railings, and there for him stretched a field of flowers in all directions to all the ends of the world. All the roses in all the colors were waving in a wind he had not felt before.  
They were arranged in concentric circles with each a different color. And the more inwards the circle was placed, so did the shade of the roses darken. On the outside they shone sky blue while the innermost roses were a pigment of purple so dark it bordered on to black.  
They completely covered the once cratered landscape and their petals caught the sun’s rays in ways that dizzied the little prince’s eyes.  
He looked up. And where the stars were, there was now a blue sky with a sun that shone straight on him.  
“I didn’t see this when I came in.”  
A hand landed on his shoulder.  
“Because you are looking with child’s eyes,” said the chairman. “It is a very limiting view. Like me, you like roses. Come, I will teach you about them and how to handle them.”  
The chairman pulled the little prince away from the balcony and led him inside the tower’s hall.  
“There is a rose on my planet,” the little prince said.  
“And a very fine rose it is, I am sure. But you don’t know much about roses, do you?”  
The little prince remembered the rose and planet he left and said nothing.  
“She has hurt you, hasn’t she?” the chairman smiled, “You have that look.”  
Deeper and deeper they walked in that great tower’s hall. A vast room bordered by stone walls with glass-stained windows that colored the incoming light. In the center of it stood a statuelike thing he couldn’t make out with his eyes.  
The sounds of their shoes stepping on the marble floor echoed in the sparse room, but the little prince did hear a soft noise at the edge of his hearing. It was hard to listen to it as the chairman was still talking.

“Don’t worry about it. A rose is a complex creature. It is a pity that it takes skill and age to master the rose’s love.”  
The chairman turned his head to the little prince and smiled. “Still, it grants a satisfaction unlike any kind you will ever find in the world.”  
They stood now before a desk. On it laid a signet ring with a rose seal engraved.  
“All you need to do is to wear that ring and in time you will gain what you lacked.”  
But the little prince didn’t look at the desk, he looked at the statuelike thing that stood at the hall’s center. It had the shape of a giant shouldering a big staff with at each end a globe. It was making that humming sound the little prince had picked up.  
“What is that?” he asked.  
“That?” the chairman repeated, but then he smiled. “It is how I control the world. How I shape it.”  
“The world?” the little prince asked.  
“Yes. It is a great power. Is there anything you desire to see become reality? I will show it to you.”  
“Oh!” the little prince whispered. “Show me a sunset! I love them so!”  
The chairman raised his brows slightly. “A sunset? And not the rose you cherish so much? I can bring her here.”  
“You can do that?”  
“She would be safe within my powers. Here she would have a bell globe in which she will be free of all threats forever.” He chuckled. “There are no tigers here.”  
“No tigers,” said the little prince quietly.

The chairman laughed. “So much concern for your rose. A noble heart is showing. But a sunset you wished, and I will give it to you now.”  
He gestured to the great wall windows through which the sun filled the hall with clear light and at once the great machine whirred.  
The bright light dimmed to orange. And the once midday sun was hung low, nearing the edge of the window’s view. And the clouds that streaked the sky were painted in gold and salmon-pink.  
The little prince stared through the wall windows at the sunset.  
“And?” the chairman said.  
The little prince turned to him. ‘The stars really do listen to you! I thought. I didn’t know that was possible!’  
The chairman smiled and picked the ring up from the desk. “The path before you has been prepared. Take the first step and wear this ring. You can make them listen to you too.”  
It shone bright red in the sunset’s light.  
The little prince’s eyes were fixated on this.  
“Even the king couldn’t set the sun down when he wanted to,” he said. Then he heard a whirring. He looked away to that great machine standing in the hall’s center. He frowned. “How does that machine work?”  
“Patience,” the chairman chastised. “You are too young yet.”  
“How does that machine work?” asked the little prince again.  
“By my will,” said the chairman.

Then the little prince looked at him and wondered why this man didn’t know how his machine worked. For when the little prince was still on his planet he had watered his rose every day, cleaned his volcanoes every week and pulled the baobab’s seeds from the rosebushes when he noticed them. By doing this he knew about the danger of baobab’s, how slowly and steadily cleaned-out volcanoes burned without eruptions and that his rose possessed four thorns and needed love.  
And so, his hunger for an answer unsatisfied, he turned away from the chairman and began to walk towards that great machine. And immediately its lights started to flicker, and in the machine’s humming came a crack.  
The hall’s walls began to turn and to twist, as if the great stones they were built with had been malleable clay all along.  
In the midst of this the chairman stood still as a statue as the little prince came closer and closer to his machine.  
“Stop!” he cried out at last, “Stop! Come back!”  
He started to run towards the little prince.  
The little prince stood in the front of the machine and didn’t hear any of the chairman’s orders for they were drowned in machine’s disjointed noise.He heard the screams it made and he reached out. And he touched its metal.

A flash filled the hall.  
The little prince laid on the floor, blinking his eyes while the dizzying images in his vision faded, then he looked around.  
Through the cracks in the walls dim light seeped in, and it flickered through the broken glass-stained windows. Their fragments on the floor reflected it ice blue. These shattered pieces of light covered the floor as if were they snowflakes blown in.  
He stood up, still a bit wobbly. A sound throbbed in his head, as if echoing of the machine’s noise. His vision slowly returned and he saw where the great glass wall-windows stood once. Now they were less like windows anymore, but stretched mouths with remaining shards as jutting teeth.  
He went to them and looked out.  
Gone were the roses that waved in the wind. The whole field was filed in rows of flowers that stood still, with the stalks and petals in ice encased, and with all their colors under glassy blue subsumed.  
They glittered prettily in the dim light, and the little prince wept.  
The sun and the stars were no more. The whole sky was suffused with a fleshly pink. Behind it certain forms seemed to flicker, as was it the inside of a shut eye.  
A hand was on his shoulder again. The little prince turned and saw the chairman watching him.  
“Please, help them!” the little prince said while tears streamed down his cheeks  
The chairman raised a brow. “Please do clarify what you are saying.”  
“These roses – they are in pain!”  
“They came here of their own free will. As they all do. And,” the chairman leaned closer to the prince, “you think this is the true pain a rose can suffer?“  
The little prince looked to the frozen flowers. “There is nothing worse than this.”  
“You are wrong again. Tell me,” the chairman said, while letting his hand rest on the little prince’s shoulders, “what you think will happen to your rose.”  
“My rose?”  
“Yes, your beloved rose.”

The little prince thought of his rose, standing alone on that little planet. How its roots would still dig into the soil, how the leaves would still drink of the water that would rain down.  
“What do you mean?,” he frowned. “I don’t understand it at all!”  
“Perfectly understandable,” the chairman said, “You are still a child, after all.” He smiled. “As I said, you don’t know much about roses. Your rose, she is ephemeral.”  
“Ephemeral?” asked the little prince.  
“Yes. It means her existence is of a very short time. Soon her leaves will wither, her roots will dry up. Under the stars she will crumble on the ground and she will be discarded and forgotten, forever.”  
The little prince imagined his rose lying on the dried out earth of his planet, lying amidst the shattered glass of the globe, a naked stalk between drooping petals and thorns, covered with starving caterpillars.  
“It doesn’t need to happen,” said the chairman, and then held out for the little prince’s eyes once again the Ring. “This is the value of this ring. With this you will remain in possession of the rose you love. Within these walls she will stand free, in this refuge against all forms of rotting, a defense against decay and death.”  
He twirled the ring. The metal caught the murky pink light of the sky and the whole of the ring either seemed a piece of flesh or a ruby.  
“If you love her, little prince,” the little prince heard the chairman saying, “will you let her die then?”  
The chairman took the little prince’s hand and pushed the ring in the palm.  
“What will you choose?”  
The little prince beheld the ring which had a dizzying shining. Then his gaze went to the flowers still standing in the asteroid’s soil.  
Then he looked again at the chairman standing near him.  
“I don’t know my rose,” he said, “but I know she has grown her roots in my planet’s earth. It is in my planet’s air that she has grown her leaves. She can’t leave the planet like I did.”  
“You are mistaken. I said-“  
But the little prince turned, stretched his hand out of the broken window and dropped the ring.  
It blinked in its fall before it disappeared in the roses.  
“Am I to take this as an answer?” said the chairman.  
The little prince said nothing.  
“Your rose will die then. By your own hand.”

The little prince looked through the broken window to the sky and the hazy shades that seemed to be moving behind the fleshly pink.  
“And you will die too, little prince, “ the chairman said. “You too are ephemeral. Leave this world and you will die in nothing else but a world filled with sand and sharp pains.”  
The little prince hesitated then. But he drew himself back up.  
“I don’t understand what you mean with dying,” he said, “But I know that outside here are the true stars shining and giving sunsets and roses growing. There is nothing of that here.”  
And before the chairman could answer the little prince took flight. He rose above the frozen rose fields, but then the murky pink sky wrapped around him like sticky paper. The little prince struggled, and inch by inch kept moving until he broke through in a blinding flash.  
He covered his eyes with his hands until the sharp brightness quieted down and he opened his eyes. Before him laid the open space and the whole of it was filled with twinkling starry fields.  
The little prince hovered and looked at them. Then he casted a look behind.  
There floated still the barren asteroid with the white tower half-buried beneath the sand.  
Then the little prince turned and flew away, continuing his journey amidst the planets turning and the stars shining.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When the little prince had told this tale, a chill ran over my spine. I looked up. And, though the sun was coming closer to the horizon, it was still not setting.  
“I have never met such an irresponsible person!”  
I looked back to the little prince. He looked furious and tears once again welled up in his eyes.  
“He didn’t care for his planet and his roses! He just lives there and does nothing for his world. How one can live like that!”  
His words rang through the greying sky.  
But then his fury faded from his face and a sad look came over him.  
“Do you know what it means to die?” he asked.  
I thought of the friends who fell in reconnaissances by enemy planes. Of houses fallen in pieces, of roads broken up and swarmed by pursued people. Of how the world before the war had drifted away. And of how I was still alive.  
I felt the still hot sands burning my legs, the thirst creeping in my throat and the desert dunes surrounding all around me. They were rushing and whispering in a swelling wind of bones sand-buried.  
I was silent to his question but then the little prince said in a soft tone: “Someday, I think I must go away too.”  
I took him in my arms.  
“Forget that, little prince,” I said to him, “Forget what that man said. You are young and it is still too soon for you to think of that.”  
I let go of him and he looked at me. “Perhaps,” he muttered and turned his eyes away.  
Then he smiled. “Look,” he said, “the sunset is beginning.”  
I turned too, the sky had turned dark-red and the clouds had started to look like smoldering lumps of ember.  
The little prince stood up, and gazed at this daily occasion. “Look,” he said again, “everywhere the light touches…”  
I looked around and for a brief moment thought ourselves to be in a land of light. The dunes and the glowed bright orange, as if they answered to the sun’s light with a light of their own.  
And my hands and arms were overlaid with a soft glowing radiance, even every little hair was a small beam in itself.  
It was such a sunset as I remembered having seen once in my youth. I had thought the memory imagination.  
“What I love about sunsets, “ he said suddenly and soft, “is that they bring different kinds of lights. Ah, how I wish it would go on forever!”  
He stood so alone there, so I too stood up.  
He laughed when he noticed me, his sadness so deeply felt now so quickly cast away as a child does, and said: “Look, the stars are coming out!”  
And they were. And so we stood there together, in the midst of the desert that had no water or well, looking at how new and little pricks of light appeared above the big light that was downing and dying.  
We slept well in the night that followed.

THE END  
  


_Akio kept watching after the little prince took flight. Soon the little prince became a twinkling light, disfiguring his stellar structures. Then it disappeared, restoring the celestial order.  
Akio stood there for a while, watching the stars turning by, again and again. Then he withdrew in his hall.  
On the sofa he laid himself down and snapped his fingers. At once the shutters rushed over the hall’s windows down, shutting even the faint starlight out and the projector recommenced its humming.  
Darkness came over the hall and over him and he shut his eyes and dreamed once more._  
  



End file.
